Contemporary Benefits Issue - Research Paper Example

Sims (2007) highlighted that providing benefits in todays economy is a great challenge for the employers owing to the changing demographic and cost trends. Discussing about the most contemporary and dynamic compensation and benefit issues in the current decade, Sims (2007) highlighted changes in pension benefits, flexible benefits and healthcare costs and coverage as the most contemporary ones. In this paper, healthcare cost and coverage is the focus of attention as a contemporary benefits issue for employers.

The paper analyses why and how offering health benefit is a major challenge for employers today and highlights the major components of this challenge. It also presents the implications of this challenge for the employers and discusses the possible future of this issue. Health benefits, according to Sims (2007, p. 467) grab the most attention of the employers today. Employees are also becoming more and more aware of health cover offered by the employers and demand it to be a part of their compensation package.

Yet offering health benefits is challenging because of several accompanying issues such as the decisions on the premium rate (individual or group rate), employee contribution in premium, health cover for family, types of diseases covered, and the cover range (reimbursement of prescription drugs receipts, hospital fees etc.). Out of all the reasons, the main reason why health benefits poses a major challenge for the employers is because of the high cost of offering health insurance to the employees as stated by Sims (2007, p. 456) ‘the average cost of employer health plans continue to raise at a double-digit pace.

” In addition to this, due to increased cost of living and increasing health problems employees have become conscious and demand health benefits to be a part of their compensation package. This increased concern of employees to receive health benefits in their jobs has made it difficult for the employers to